B2B Connection

Traditional reporting tools are primarily a product of the past.  Sure, some of these tools have a nice application for operational reporting needs. But we’re seeing more frequently that many of these operational reporting features are being built into ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems directly. With the growth in computing power, ERP systems can often handle the operational reporting load and therefore do not require separate reporting systems for operational needs.  This may not be the case with larger organizations. Take Workday for example.  This product has fantastic reporting capabilities built into the ERP directly.  Both the reports and the product are SaaS-based and available from a standard web browser.  Workday offers drillable displays that are contextual and actionable.  Additionally, the product provides real-time operational intelligence by cross-walking data sets that reside within the Workday platform.  This is a good example of some of the sophistication – and general ‘goodness’ – that is happening in the ERP world. Operational or transactional reporting tools, however, often do not answer the more sophisticated questions of the business users.  These reporting tools are commonly used for lists or standard reports (e.g. budgets versus actuals, list of customers/vendors/students).  You’ll rarely see an operational reporting tool answer a […]

12/30/2014 Executive interview series by Vinay Bhagat, CEO TrustRadius Battle Intensifies with $250m Raised in Last 12 Months On April 29th, Social Media Management software company Sprinklr announced $40m in financing from Iconiq Capital, a firm which manages assets for some high profile technology executives, bringing their total funds raised to $77.5 million. In the last 12 months, three social media software companies targeting the enterprise have raised close to $250 million. Spredfast raised $32.5m on January 3rd. Hootsuite raised $165m in August 2013. These figures exclude the internal investments made by large software companies like Adobe, Salesforce and Oracle in their acquired social media management solutions. Enterprise Suites Expand Organically and via Acquisition As we discussed in our Buyer’s Guide to Social Media Management and blog post, “Social Media Management in Large Enterprises”, many large enterprises have unique needs including the ability to manage cross-functional coordination. Sprinklr and several of its competitors are adding capabilities historically offered by point solutions either organically or via acquisition. With their funding, Sprinklr announced the launch of a paid media platform, to help companies deploy and measure the performance of paid media ads. This product is designed to compete with solutions like Kenshoo. This announcement follows on the heels of their acquisition […]

An estimated $14 billion is spent on business intelligence (BI) software each year. Last year, the market grew more than 8 percent, with certain segments like Cloud BI growing much faster. ­It is also attracting a lot of investment capital. BI software companies Domo, Thoughtspot, Birst, GoodData, Looker and Tidemark raised over $200 million in investment capital in 2014 alone. Business Intelligence software is also an extremely popular category on TrustRadius. Unique page views for BI software products – a measure for how many people are running evaluations – grew 16 percent from Q2 to Q3. While page views are not an absolute representation of category growth for a variety of reasons – including our own improvement in search rankings – they are a good proxy. The most evaluated BI product on TrustRadius in Q3 by a fair margin was Tableau, followed by Qlikview. The next most evaluated products were IBM Cognos, Tibco Spotfire, and SAP Business Objects. While evaluation frequency is typically a good thing, it can also signal that you are being frequently considered for replacement. Three of the top four most evaluated products – Tableau, Qlikview, and Tibco Spotfire – are discovery/ visualization tools. Two of the top ten most evaluated solutions – Birst and Domo […]

InsightSquared raises $13.5m Series C Round to further develop SMB Business Intelligence offering InsightSquared provides business intelligence software to SMBs, with a particular strength in dashboards and pipeline analysis for the Salesforce platform. Hot on the heels of the Salesforce Analytics Cloud announcement last month, and following funding announcements by a number of new BI entrants like Domo, ThoughtSpot, Tidemark, and Looker earlier this year, this funding provides further evidence that the BI market is red hot. This new infusion of cash brings the total raised by InsightSquared over its four-year lifespan to $27m. The company has been growing quickly, doubling headcount and revenue over the last year. BI software was historically something that only large-enterprises had the capacity to use. The category was dominated by enterprise vendors like IBM Cognos, SAP Business Objects and MicroStrategy. More recently, data discovery and visualization tools like Tableau and QlikView, along with cloud BI vendors like Birst and GoodData, have succeeded in making BI accessible to the mid-market, but these tools still require a level of technical sophistication that is beyond the purview of many small organizations. This is the challenge that InsightSquared has taken on: making BI a feasible option for small, unsophisticated […]